I'm the coauthor of The New Killer Apps: How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups. I’m also the coauthor of Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance (Harvard Business School Press, 1998) and Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years (Portfolio, 2008).
I cofounded and am the managing director of the Devil’s Advocate Group, a consultancy that helps business leaders design and stress test their innovation strategies.
Follow me at Facebook, Twitter @chunkamui or at Google+.

But, what advantage does GoogleGoogle have over traditional car makers, some of whom have been exploring driverless technology longer than Google has existed? Even if Google succeeds from a research standpoint, how can it profit from efforts that are so far from its core business of search-driven advertising? These are the key questions I will explore in this article.

The question of Google’s strategic advantage in driverless cars has stirred up a hot debate in the virtual corridors here at Forbes. As Joann Muller and Haydn Shaughnessy have pointed out in their responses to this series, car makers have their own driverless car programs and clear plans for deployment. Joann and Haydn’s view of the prospects of Google’s winning over car makers are “baloney” and “nonsense,” respectively.

I confess that I am not as confident about a Google victory as Joann and Haydn are sure of its defeat. Google’s driverless cars might still hit a lot of speed bumps, and they might even crash into a wall. But, guided by research that Paul Carroll and I have done on thousands of corporate disruptive innovation efforts—including both successes and failures—I believe that Google is doing a lot of things right with its driverless car.

Google’s approach has already vaulted it into contention in a race that no one expected it to even be in. It also positions Google to profit handsomely. Here’s why:

1. Google is thinking bigger.

Alan Kay observed that “Point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” His point is that being smart doesn’t depend on just mastering knowledge or tools. Instead, the level of insight about how those tools fit into the world can make a big difference.

Our research shows successful innovators dare to Think Big. They focus on the killer apps that can rewrite the rules of a company or industry, rather than just looking for incrementally faster, better, and cheaper change. Thinking big allows innovators to start with a clean sheet of paper and consider a full range of design approaches and possible futures. They consider not only building on current capabilities and business models, but also moving in brand new directions.

Google thought big when it aimed to reduce accidents, the time and energy wasted in traffic, and the number of cars on the road by 90 percent. To attain such high aspirations, Google set an aggressive research and development agenda that employed more expensive technology and aimed for full automation, rather than using off-the-shelf technology that enable narrow applications.

Human error accounts for between 77 and 90 percent of all road accidents. Google’s long-term approach is to get drivers out of the loop, rather than make them better drivers. Also, car sharing is much more limited without full automation, meaning that a 10x savings in transportation costs and massive reductions in the number of cars would not be possible.

From the car makers’ perspective, an incremental approach makes all the sense in the world. Introducing driverless technology bit by bit gives companies a long stream of premium-priced safety features that are completely consistent with current designs. A piecemeal approach also eases the specter of manufacturer liability issues that would arise if human drivers were not in the loop in terms of controlling the car but were nominally in control. Most importantly, the approach does not challenge existing business models.

Our research warns, though, about the dangers of thinking small in the face of disruptive technology.

Kodak, for example, failed because it allowed core patents in digital photography to languish in its vaults for decades. When Kodak roused itself to leverage its digital assets, it wasted years and hundreds of millions of dollars deploying them in incremental fashion—such as with its Advantix system, which used digital as a preview mechanism in a film camera.

It is human nature to see change as incremental and to think that customers want that, too. But, as Kodak, Blockbuster, Borders and scores of other former market leaders have learned, incremental thinking can leave huge openings for bolder companies willing to pursue new killer apps—like Google.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Ford motor company has had adaptive cruise control for years, why do you have to make it sound like only top end vehicles have those features. Give some credit to american manufacturers every now and then. Everybody already knows you favor everything and anything foreign.

I think that you’re reinforcing my argument. The car maker model is to introduce these kinds of features in premium models and migrate them through the fleet over time. That’s how they’re thinking about the next generation of technology—not as shooting for “driverless” but instead as the next generation of “intelligent” adaptive cruise control.

Regards, Chunka

P.S. For the record, not that it should matter, I have a GM and a Ford in my garage.

Do the math! 150% of the existing cars in China need replacing. If China wants to kill off the old people faster then keep up the particulates in the city air. That may be their objective, but it comes with the crippling of the children of the best and brightest. Those that are allowed to live in the city and who have gotten rich on their smarts, can easily see the advantage of a concierge car that takes them door to door, wherever they want to go in the city. Like leasing a private jet, it costs a tiny fraction of owning one and you don’t have to pay a pilot.

Surely some Chinese entrepreneur will take Google’s open car system to the Chinese middle class long before GM, Ford, and Chrysler stop working the US regulatory system against driverless cars.

The more I consider this, the more I am convinced that the most important individual in the adoption of this technology will be the attorney who successfully sues an individual for driving his car instead of using the safer technology, or a manufacturer for not including the safer technology.

In the woodworking machine industry, table saw manufacturers have been sued for not adopting the “Sawstop” technology to protect their users from injury. The saw makers are under pressure to adopt the new technology after a jury awarded 1.5 million dollars to one plaintiff.

On a side note, 40 years ago I drove taxi in a city that did not meter, and allowed cabs to carry multiple passengers; the art of creating “runs” across the city by really good dispatchers provided better service to customers and increase the earnings of the drivers. Also there was little complaint; it was accepted as a social event to share a ride, and riders recognized their ride, while maybe longer, was cheaper. It just occurred to me that this experience is relevant to this general discussion.

Yes, but you don’t understand how lawsuits work. You sue the guy with the big bucks. No one sues individuals.

How about the lawyer that sues the automated car manufacturer for the car that got into a crash due to a bug in the software? A class action from every person who bought the car? That’s big bucks. And very easy to convince a jury that a robot car went haywire. Try convincing a jury that has been driving cars all of their adult lives that having a person behind the wheel is “unsafe”.

The kind of change we’re talking about with self driving cars is epoch shattering. It will not happen as fast as any of these authors think, because there’s no real demand for it on the consumer side. My guess is this stuff will be implemented kind of like the aircraft autopilots. There will still be a requirement to have a driver in the car that can take over at any time. People just don’t trust automated cars, and that’s not going to change any time soon.

I drove a current model mercedes that has all the assists available. My experience with those underline just how far ahead the google self-driving car is. The big car makers are solving the easiest problems in the easiest driving situations first gradually and tentatively increasing the complexity but as they take each step up the complexity chain they will frustrate confuse and even endanger the driver in driving situations that are a bit more complex than the system is designed for. Google is solving the city traffic problem first (which solves all the other, simpler, driving situations), and showing it is safe before selling the product.

I’d say it a bit differently. Yes, Google has been working on solving the city driving problem, but they’ve already mastered almost everything else in the process.

It isn’t really even ‘city driving’ that they have a problem with now… it is what to do when their safety and ‘law abiding’ programming indicates that there are no options at all.

For example, when they showed the car to legislators in Washington DC the automated drive got stymied by a car that was poorly parked such that the remaining width of road between the parked car and the lane divider for oncoming traffic was below the Google car’s safety thresh-hold. A human driver would just wait for an opening and drive partly in the oncoming traffic lane… but that’s technically unsafe (and often illegal) so the Google car just stopped and demanded the human driver take over.

What does a Google car do when there is a tree in the road or a human driving into oncoming traffic? Being able to handle that kind of unexpected situation is really the only remaining hurdle for them to overcome. The answer will probably be to find a reasonable balance between ‘obey safety rules and laws’ and ‘find a way to keep moving’.

The answer will still be “stop and give it to the human”. There will never be an automated car that can handle any situation that will ever come up. But then handling 99% of them will probably be good enough.